A utility provider, such as a gas, electricity, or water provider, among others, may have a large number of control, measuring, and sensing devices installed in the field in order to control transmission and distribution of the product, measure and record product usage, and detect problems. Such devices may include water, gas, or electrical meters, remotely controlled valves, flow nodes, leak detection devices, etc. Utility meters may have wireless communication capabilities to send and receive wireless communications with a remote communication device, enabling remote reading of meters. Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI), Automatic Meter Reading (AMR), and Advanced Metering Management (AMM) are systems that measure, collect, and analyze utility data using advanced metering devices such as water meters, gas meters, and electricity meters.
As the techniques for monitoring utility data continue to evolve, the use of end-devices to provide additional functionality to unsophisticated sensors has become more commonplace. A typical network may include thousands of end-devices, also known as endpoints or nodes. A node, as used herein, may refer to either a composite device in a network capable of performing a specific function, or a communication module connected to such a device and configured to provide communications for the device. Thus, for example, rather than requiring manual, human-based collection of resource measurement data from sensors placed in geographically distinct locations, nodes may report resource data to centralized locations using wired and/or wireless communications. Due to the nature of the types of resources being monitored and/or controlled, these nodes and associated sensors may be placed in remote or difficult to access locations. Consequently, it is advantageous for these end computing devices to transmit resource measurement data over longer distances.
LoRa™ RF technology from Semtech™ Corporation is one type of long-range wireless communication technology, among others, that has been developed to enable communications to be made over long distances. Long-range wireless communications may be used with devices, including sensors and actuators, for mobile-to-mobile (M2M) and Internet of Things (IoT) applications, such as industrial automation, low power applications, battery operated sensors, smart city, agriculture, metering, and street lighting. An open long-range wireless wide area network, one non-limiting example being a LoRaWAN™ network, refers to a long-range wide area network with an open standard geared toward a large number of endpoints sending relatively small amounts of data through the network to an associated host server or network server. LoRaWAN™ refers to a standard sponsored by the LoRa Alliance™.
Regardless of any particular standard, long-range wireless networks often include fairly sophisticated long-range wireless gateways for communicating with endpoints. The cost of building, deploying, and maintaining such gateways can be fairly high and is often only cost effective when it will enable a significant number of endpoints to communicate within the network. Long-range wireless network gateways forward incoming packets from endpoints to an associated server, which may be located in a cloud network, and broadcast outgoing packets received from servers. It can be difficult or impossible in many networks to choose locations for an efficient number of gateways to reach all endpoints within a geographical area.